Well here's some pretty huge news. The Court Of Justice of the European Union has just ruled that people should be able to resell downloaded games. In an environment where publishers are trying to destroy basic consumer rights like the ability to resell physical products you've paid for, this could be one heck of a turnaround for customers. And that's no matter what it might say in the EULAs. This could have absolutely enormous implications on how services like Steam, Origin, GamersGate and the like work, and finally restore some rights back to the gamer.

Face detection is a common sight in still photography, but it's a rarity in video outside of certain research projects. Google may be keen to take some of the mystery out of those clips through a just-published patent application: its technique uses video frames to generate clusters of face representations that are attached to a given person. By knowing what a subject looks like from various angles, Google could then attach a name to a face whenever it shows up in a clip, even at different angles and in strange lighting conditions.

Eichenwald's conversations reveal that a management system known as "stack ranking"--a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor - effectively crippled Microsoft's ability to innovate. "Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed - every one - cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees," Kurt Eichenwald writes.

A big piece coming up in Vanity Fair's August issue (on the streets very soon). It'll probably appear just as Microsoft has the embarrassment of making a net loss for the first time in its public history because of the aQuantive writedown.

In fact, in 2011, Google's search and advertising tools helped provide $80bn of economic activity for 1.8m advertisers, website publishers and nonprofits across the U.S. You can see the state-by-state breakdown on our economic impact website.

This sort of background-hum lobbying occurs when companies think they're under pressure from other externalities. Compare an example from Microsoft in 2007. What's Google worried about?